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| User | Thread poster: Dan Brennan translator blacklists |
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Dan Brennan 
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:00
  Member (2006)
Russian to English
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TOPIC STARTER | | Can you feel it? | Dec 6, 2009 |
Marie-Hélène Hayles wrote:
As one of those saying that most of the translations I'd been sent for revision or comment were mediocre or worse, I wanted to add a couple of points in response to the latest posts.
1) I've never seen revision as a point-scoring exercise. I think Paul Cohen's approach is very sensible: if the translation is basically OK, touch it as little as possible, but if there are mistakes (mistranslations, omissions, typos, etc.) then do whatever needs to be done.
It's also important to ask what the client wants: most of the revisions I do are for the same clients (I wasn't including those with my previous statements, as they are a special case) and I know who the translators are (they also revise my translations for the same clients). In this case, the revisions are done to standardise the translations as well as spot any errors, and so can contain changes that would appear nit-picking to an outsider.
When working with a new client, I always ask them what they want from the revision - correction of errors and omissions only or stylistic changes if considered necessary. Some will only want the first, while others also want the style to be improved, where necessary.
2) I often find it easier to "sex up" a mediocre translation than I would have found it to produce a great translation of the same document myself. It's similar to what Williamson says about "seeing" words that aren't actually there: when you translate a file yourself, your familiarity with the text can sometimes make it difficult to spot any awkward bits. Whereas when reading what someone else has written, these jump out and are easily corrected. For this and other reasons, I think practically all texts should ideally be translated and revised by different people.
3) Stating that a given translation is poor is not necessarily saying that you could do a better job yourself. I have been asked to comment in the past on translations that were rejected by the end client because they were too literal or dull (I mentioned one of them earlier in the thread). In at least one case the client was absolutely right, and I spent an hour going through the translation pointing out problems with it. Could I have done a better job myself? Possibly not: in fact I wouldn't have accepted it (and wasn't offered it) in the first place, as it was a general promotional text and so way out of my field.
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One of the problems I frequently encounter when I review translations into English is that the translator lacks one of the profession's most fundamental requirements: namely a feeling for language.
It's hard to quantify this using any kind of scientific/objective guage, but nonetheless it's a real issue.
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Paul Cohen
Greenland
Local time: 18:00
German to English
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| | Yes, I can feel it | Dec 6, 2009 |
Good translators need to have a flair for language, no doubt about it. It’s an essential quality, but how can we objectively rate it? I'm afraid that's where we enter the realm of subjectivity.
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Williamson
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:00
Flemish to English
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| | Rate the rater. | Dec 6, 2009 |
Objectively rating it?
"agnecies", "guage" are either new words in English or typos for "agencies" and "gauge": -1
-your's is a grammatical error: -2 It has to be "yours": "Yours" is the second person possessive pronoun - it replaces "your" + noun. "Yours" should never have an apostroph.
Shouldn't are rater and native of English "feel" that you never use "your's"?
Start from a scale of 10 and deduce points for types of mistakes.
Translators, who are below a certain average are removed from the list of suppliers.
So, why blacklist them.
Such a system is objective.
A "feeling" is subjective, because also based on background and surroundings. Reading through a style guide and being aware of language codes (good old Basil Bernstein) might be useful in judging the work of others. The type of translation also matters.
You don't judge technical translations by the same standards as literary work.
[Edited at 2009-12-06 19:11 GMT]
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xxxAguas de Mar
Brazil
| | Such a pity... | Dec 7, 2009 |
Williamson wrote:
Objectively rating it?
"agnecies", "guage" are either new words in English or typos for "agencies" and "gauge": -1
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This thread was turning out to be one of the most enriching I have read in these forums. We are "talking" here, not delivering translations to our clients. Any person who corrects a colleague publicly makes it to my black list ipso facto, and yes, that is a very subjective appreciation.
[Edited at 2009-12-07 01:35 GMT]
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Williamson
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:00
Flemish to English
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| | Postgraduate in sarcasm. | Dec 7, 2009 |
No, I don't have a postgraduate in sarcasm (business) yet. I only know that customers read these forums too.
Translation is all about writing using the correct grammar, (does Norman and Saxon genitive ring a bell?), the correct semantics, the correct interpunction and the correct style. Writing a possessive as a Saxon genitive is not a spelling error, but shows how "good" a person, who must judge others masters the grammar rules in his/her native tongue?
Yeah, I know, I feel that on the basis of my native language as the only subjective yardstick for judging a translation...
Don't forget to put me on top of your blacklists.
[Edited at 2009-12-07 17:01 GMT]
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| Post removed: This post was hidden by a moderator or staff member because it was not in line with site rule |
Laurent KRAULAND
France
Local time: 22:00
Member (2007)
French to German
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| | Reason enough to stop, no? | Dec 7, 2009 |
Williamson wrote:
No, I don't have a postgraduate in sarcasm (business) yet. I only know that customers read these forums too.
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If we don't want said customers to wonder about our level of professionalism...
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| Post removed: This post was hidden by a moderator or staff member because it was not in line with site rule |
| Post removed: This post was hidden by a moderator or staff member because it was not in line with site rule |
| Post removed: This post was hidden by a moderator or staff member because it was not in line with site rule |
| Post removed: This post was hidden by a moderator or staff member because it was not in line with site rule |
Astrid Elke Johnson
Germany
Local time: 22:00
Member (2002)
German to English
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| | I am locking the thread now... | Dec 7, 2009 |
Its usefulness appears to have been exhausted.
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